Jon Lee Anderson: Romania and Iran, Parallels and a Correction

In response to my June 19th post on the &#8220Iran’s Basij militias,” Christian Suciu wrote in to point out an error I had made in comparing the relationship between the Basij and its theocratic regime with “the one between Nicolae Ceausescu and the loyalist miners trucked in from the Romanian countryside to strong-arm pro-democracy protesters.” Suciu writes:

Actually, the events referred to (the “Mineriads”) happened in 1990 and 1991, by which time Ceausescu was dead and buried. Ion Iliescu was President of Romania at the time, and it was he who trucked in the miners.

Siciu is absolutely right. The miners had been loyal to the Ceausescu regime for many years, but it was Iliescu—a former senior party figure and erstwhile ally of Ceausescu’s—who succeeded him after his execution in 1989, and when there was pro-democracy ferment in the capital afterward, it was Iliescu who brought in the miners to break heads and quell things. At the time, Iliescu was facing accusations that he represented little more than a face-change of the ancient regime, i.e. “Ceausescuismo without the Ceausescus.”

As in present-day Iran, the protests that were ended violently by Romania’s miners (who used bats and clubs and killed up to a hundred people) had taken place just after an election; The Party man Iliescu had been sworn in as a caretaker president following Ceausescu’s execution in December 1989. In elections held in May 1990, Iliescu won eighty-five per cent of the vote. But pro-democracy demonstrators, including many students, protested what they saw a hijacking of power by the country’s ex-communists.

After the miners’ rampage, Iliescu thanked them for their “attitude of high civic conscience” and disparaged the demonstrators as “hooligans,” as part of a “right wing neo-fascist international conspiracy.” In announcing his own crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Tehran last Friday, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei referred to the demonstrators as Iran’s “enemies” and as “espionage machines working for Zionists and the Americans,” who were determined to destroy Iran’s Islamic revolution.

Last week, coincidentally, a court in Bucharest cleared Iliescu of genocide charges in his responsibility for that crackdown and a bloodier, previous one that had immediately followed Ceausescu’s downfall, in which as many as twelve hundred civilians were killed by security forces—suggesting that repression often follows time-honored patterns, and that demands for accountability in such cases are not as easily met as one would hope.

Jon Lee Anderson, a staff writer, began contributing to The New Yorker in 1998.